Happy New Year and greetings everyone! I know the folks here at Hydrogen audio have been around and back with regards to these tests... Nonetheless, I've been collecting data from around the audio forums since early Dec 2012.

Since early December 2012, I've opened up a survey to see if music lovers & "audiophiles" around the world can tell the difference between high bitrate ~320kbps MP3 against the original un-lossy-compressed CD audio. I'm only planning to collect data until the end of January 2013.

So far, I have >70 responses from around the world with 5 continents represented. Folks have been using everything from inexpensive (but good) headphones to megabuck separates >$50K for this. There's 2 weeks left so if you've ever been curious about participating in a blind test or just want to add to the dataset, here's your chance :-).

The "test" is relatively simple and consists of 3 musical passages encoded as "Set A" vs. the same songs "Set B"; one of which was MP3 encoded.

I question whether some factor related to the specific processing methodology might be responsible for the skew of listeners in favour of the encoded files. One would more logically expect an approximately 50/50 split between lossless and lossy when the latter is at a generally transparent bitrate such as 320 kbps. The fact that 52% thought MP3 sounded better, whereas only 18% perceived no difference, suggests either some effect of your double conversion that is making the MP3s sound more appealing in some way or simply really bad and somewhat arbitrary judgements by the relevant respondents.